Indexing Multiple Documents Across Volumes (Word 2000)

I have a six-volume set of documents, totaling ~2,000 pages. The original documents were created in Word 6.0, and have been edited and updated over the years in various versions, up to Word 2000. Early on, we attempted to set up a master document structure...we learned our lesson. :-)

There are several hundred files. Page numbering is of the format "A-1, B-12, etc." with the letters defined by a SEQ field in each document. Each volume's page numbering begins again with "A-1."

We currently generate an index for each volume by creating a separate document that uses RD fields to reference all the files included in that volume. We use the following INDEX field to create the index: { INDEX e " TAB " h "A" s chapter c "2" }

The client is now requiring a master index for all six volumes. This will require three-part page numbers in the index where the first digit is the volume number (1-A-1, 3-C-22, etc.). As near as I can tell, Word only recognizes one s switch in an INDEX field. I, therefore, have not been able to come up with a completely automated way to create the master index.

My current work-around plan is to generate each volume index, adding the volume number and a hyphen to the e switch in the INDEX field: { INDEX e " TAB 1-" h "A" s chapter c "2" }. Once the indexes are all generated, we will convert the indexes to editable text. We will then need to laboriously cut and paste to create the master index.

You would generate a voume's index and convert that to text, then run a procedure to extract the Word_or_Phrase being indexed along with the page(s) Word has captured. You tell the procedure which column (based on which volume) it belongs to. As part of storing the pages, the procedure adds the volume number to each page reference (or, if you've already added it, so much the better). Once all six volumes are in the database, you use another procedure to combine all of the pages into a single list for each word/phrase, and pump that out into an appropriately formatted table. Of course, this assumes that your index only has one "level." For multi-level indexes, it would be somewhat more complicated.

Doesn't it seem as though there should be a tool out there that already does this??